- Roy Delbyck explains how he amassed his collection of printed materials, from diaries to film tickets, on the West in China and the Chinese experience in the US
My parents were first-generation Americans, the children of immigrants. My dad’s father came over in the 1880s from Vladivostok, Russia, and my mum’s parents were from Poland. My dad was an insurance broker.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1952. I’m the youngest of three and have an older brother and sister. When I was one, we moved to Freeport, about 25 miles from New York. My siblings were somewhat raucous, but for me it was a pretty idyllic childhood and I was given tons of freedom.
In the genes
I’ve always been a retrospective person; I always look back. The gene or predilection for collecting was there ready to be stoked when I was a kid.
As a seven-year-old, I spent my pocket money on baseball cards at the local five-and-dime store. My team was – and still is – the New York Yankees. Each pack had five cards and a slab of bubblegum. To get all the cards you wanted, you had to keep buying more packets and swap them with friends.
From about the age of 10, I collected stamps – but not well, because I’d buy mint stamps and then glue them into my stamp book. And then coins for a while. There was the fun of finding and acquiring things for my collections, the historical aspect. I wasn’t so much into trading them. It was the hunt and just having it.
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Character building
When dad got sick, my mum started helping out in his insurance business. Growing up, I was surrounded by lots of immigrants – Irish, Italian, Jewish. I started studying Russian in junior high school and that set me on the path to wanting to study Chinese. The Russian has turned out to be useful because in my collecting I come across a fair bit of Russian material.
I went to Northwestern University, in Evanston, just outside Chicago, and then transferred in 1972 to Connecticut College, where I got my undergraduate degree in Chinese. I met my first wife, Kipp, at university. She is Dutch from St Louis and we got married after I graduated.
Asia bound
I wanted to find a way to go to Taiwan to study Chinese further. An uncle was president of United States-based clothing company Bobbie Brooks that had just started doing more production in Asia. It was through him that I got a job with a Japanese trading company.
I arrived in Hong Kong with Kipp in 1975. My office was in Star House, in Tsim Sha Tsui – over the years, I’ve had three offices here. When I needed Western food, I’d go to San Francisco Steak House (now closed).
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During my days in the garment business, I collected quite a lot because my wife worked in an antique shop. I worked for the trading company for eight months and then we moved to Taiwan for three years and then back to Hong Kong for two years.
In Hong Kong, the company was manufacturing in Macau, Malaysia and Japan, and I was the quality-control guy, which wasn’t really my thing. It was fast and interesting, but I wanted to tap into my brain power a little more. So, in 1980, I went to law school at the University of California, Davis.
I graduated in 1983 and took a job with a San Francisco firm, Graham & James, for two years and then moved with that company to Hong Kong in 1985.
I became much more interested in the ephemera – the letters and diaries and one-off things. The sort of things that should have been thrown away and never survived, but are still with us
What’s the plan?
In 1987, I joined Baker McKenzie. It was there that I figured out my career game plan in terms of the law. I wanted to start representing people who were somewhere in the supply chain – buyers, sellers, importers. I’d been in that business for five years, so I knew something of what it was like on a day-to-day basis.
There wasn’t that much time for collecting as we were raising the kids. Our daughter Kyle was born in 1986, Tess in 1989 and Cole in 1992.
In 1993, I opened my own law firm and I’ve survived until today doing customs trade, supply chain and some general commercial stuff.
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Back in the game
In 2010, I had some money from selling mediocre Hong Kong apartments and bought some prints at Fine Art Asia, at the Convention and Exhibition Centre. That let the collecting genie out of the bottle.
Initially, I wanted to buy stuff related to the West in China, mostly books from the 15th and 16th centuries. Over time, I shifted my focus to the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s all about China and the West in China, but the Chinese in the United States accounts for 10 to 15 per cent of what I have.
I became much more interested in the ephemera – the letters and diaries and one-off things. The sort of things that should have been thrown away and never survived, but are still with us. A laundry ticket or movie ticket.
Going large
I bought from specialist antique, art and book dealers, such as Jonathan Wattis and Yves Azemar. And then I started buying all over the universe, on eBay and going to fairs.
I am a trustee of a museum in Chinatown (in New York) called the Museum of Chinese in America, which is the largest repository of Chinese ephemera related to the Chinese experience in the US. I’ve donated a few things to them.
I now go wherever my interests take me. There are certain rabbit holes that I try not to go down, like stamps or coins. I’ve got stuff on China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
After eight years, my collection was overflowing, so in 2017 I moved into a larger office in Star House, where I could have a proper library to house and display it all. Everything is chronologically catalogued and ordered by geography. Usually I can find most things in the collection within five or 10 minutes.
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The legacy dilemma
What constitutes the offices of Roy Delbyck today is myself and Tracy, who I married. We met at Baker McKenzie and have worked together for many years. And Peggy. They are both paralegals. I got divorced in 2020 and married Tracy in 2021.
One of the things about collecting is that your mortality always figures into it – what do you do with it when you shuffle off the buffalo?
I’ve put a lot of my financial capital into building the collection, so I’m not really in a position to give it away. I’d like to sell it and, as a first proposition, to keep it in Hong Kong because I built it in Hong Kong. I have the illusion – or perhaps delusion – that someday someone will walk in and want to buy it.
One of my missions is to start putting some of my collection – the stories and images – online. I hope to start doing that next year.
A life’s work
Collecting is a fantastic passion. I have people come in all the time to see the collection and I talk about it fairly regularly. Tracy has been present since its creation and she and I are the co-owners, she’s very supportive.
Being a collector isn’t like being an academic. I can go as deep as I want to go. I’m not publishing anything, I can flit from item to item, I have freedom.
What I’ve learned and the people I’ve met – fellow collectors, historians, academics and dealers – is fantastic. It’s opened up this whole other window in my life.
